


Soft

by bluesyturtle



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Anal Sex, Consent Issues, Established Relationship, F/F, Feelings Realization, Humor, Kissing, M/M, Marathon Sex, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Schmoop, Sex Pollen, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:53:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27184796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: John gets hit with a canister of something that makes him feel a certain special kind of way. He picks Bane to help him out. Turns out he's not the only one who gets hit with the stuff.He's just the only one to get a hot sex marathon out of it.
Relationships: Bane (DCU)/John Blake, Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	Soft

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beguile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beguile/gifts).



> This honestly started as a joke, I swear. Beguile and I were reminiscing on our love of Arthur x Eames, and it reinvigorated the old Bane/Blake feels, and then we went down a rabbit hole of Christopher Nolan and Marion Cotillard, and well, basically we wrote companion sex pollen fics lmao idk man you're welcome?
> 
> Also I know sex pollen kind of automatically earns the dubious consent tag, but it's definitely enthusiastic and informed for John and Bane. But, just so you're aware, consent is a recurring theme in this fic. Okay? Okay. <3

Not that Quinn gives a shit either way, but it’s not completely her fault. In hindsight, John should’ve had his damn mouth covered up. It should’ve been the first of many precautionary measures he took when gearing up to give chase tonight as soon as the call came through on dispatch that she and Ivy had something bad cooking.

He should’ve accounted for the possibility that they might literally be cooking something.

—

“Uh-oh.”

“What, uh-oh,” Ivy deadpans, snapping her gloves off and dropping them distractedly into a duffle bag. “No, darling, don’t eat that,” she murmurs, plucking the rolled up latex out of the stolen rabbit’s reach.

The sudden displacement of air behind her tells her Harley’s peering over her shoulder.

“Gosh, he’s a cutie. They were really gonna cut him open and dissect his brain?” she asks, idle in the asking. She dangles her arm right the way over Ivy’s shoulder to nudge the rabbit’s long ears. A speck of blood gets on his luminous white fur. “Whoops! Raw deal, handsome. You’re all right now, though. I mean, _you_ weren’t gonna saw into his head and poke his brain, were you?”

The bit of an edge to the question gives Ivy some pause. Not in a bad way, she’s somewhat alarmed to find. In sort of a warm, happy way. “I thought your tastes ran more in the direction of carnivores,” she teases. “Bruce?”

“Honey, you know I swing both ways.” Harley grins, wrapping her arms around Ivy from behind, aided by the arm already slung over Ivy’s shoulder. The other she winds around Ivy’s stomach. It’s pleasant, the way that feels. “But were you? Gonna scoop out his workin’s and whatnot?”

“For what, Harley? I have my plants.”

“Neat! So then…?”

“I thought to release him into the wild, but maybe he will like the country house.”

“Ooooh,” Harley croons, chuckling darkly. She wags her eyebrows at Ivy. “The Fortune 500 guy you’re keepin’ on Vine Support?”

“You’re the only one who calls it that. You said uh-oh. Did something happen?”

“Hmm? Uh-oh… OH! Sheesh, Ivy, way to distract me, babe.”

Harley slips away, and Ivy primly zips up the duffle bag. She gingerly tests lifting it to make sure the rabbit doesn’t overbalance or slip off the sturdy bottom. He manages fine, considering. Ivy takes a breath and turns, freezing at the sight that welcomes her.

“Another one of your carnivores, Harley?”

She adjusts the detective slumped into her shoulder, huffing so that her hair puffs out. “I got him with the thing. Accidentally. In the face region, maybe?”

Ivy blinks at her, hefting the rabbit carefully so he won’t slide around. Harley’s less cautious.

“Should we stick his brain? If we went in through his nose we wouldn’t even mess him up permanently!”

Ivy can’t help a smile. Even as the man’s head lolls on her shoulder, she can’t not grin at Harley when she gets like this. “Which compound was it, Harley? Did you see?”

“Ummm.” She sustains the hum under her breath and digs around in her paint-spattered overalls. Coins and gum balls tinkle and tap against the concrete between her combat boots. She switches to the other side, dropping, impossibly, a pocketful of sand. Inspired, she thwacks the center pocket over her sternum and reveals a matte canister Ivy deliberately painted pink. “This one. I thought it looked nice.”

“Oh, Harley,” Ivy muses, helplessly fond. “Of course you did.”

—

“Well, so what’s the big deal?” Harley asks, flinging Detective Jawline-or-Whoever into the backseat of her stolen Ferrari. “He went right to sleep. Maybe he’ll stay that way.” She shoves at his feet, ultimately climbing in after him to fling his legs up over his face — “Huh. Bendy.” — before clambering over the center console into the driver’s seat. “Phew! I still don’t see why we aren’t scooping his brain out through his nose. Sounds like a fun date night to me.”

“It is a fun date night,” Ivy says, parting the duffle bag down the middle to show the goods, “stolen government property and all.”

“Mmhmm. _Hi, cutie!_ What’re you gonna call him?”

“Not certain yet. I’m open to suggestions.”

“What about… Ransom? Handsome Ransom, see? It fits!”

Ivy raises her eyebrows, and Harley beams. From the backseat, Tall-Blue-and-Handsome makes a noise that’s not for polite company. Harley takes a peek over her shoulder.

“All right back there, Officer Friendly?”

“-ere am I… where — Quinn? Quinn, what’d you… what…?”

Sitting forward in her seat with Ransom the Rabbit tucked up against her chest, Ivy peers at him, too. He’s not quite making heads or tails of a question, so she helps him along.

“You’ve been hit with an analeptic agent. This particular strain has two treatments. The first is to wait it out, and the second is to double down on doses. Counter-intuitive to formulate the antidote in such a way, perhaps, but with a supplementary dosage, the metabolism speeds and flushes it from your system faster.”

Cop Man stares at Ivy blearily, very red in his very handsome face. He licks his lips and mumbles, “…you broke into Indian Hill to steal a rabbit?”

“Ain’t he a sweetheart! His name’s Ransom!”

“Harley, focus. Choose your method of treatment, Officer Friendly.”

Harley snorts at her grave delivery of the nickname. Her girlfriend’s so cool. Kind of a nerd, but hey. Harley’s a nerd, too. PhD, and all.

“I don’t understand,” he groans, plaintively, _very adorably,_ in Harley’s opinion. Like a big kid trying not to have a bedtime. “What’d you give me?”

“Here’s the thing, sourpuss. I might’ve, y’know, roofied you? Just a teensy tiny, itty bitty, microscopic _little_ bit. This much,” Harley emphasizes, holding her fingers up.

Ivy positions her thumb and finger between them and widens it to a more accurate gap.

“OKAY, the point is, you were not being very nice in there, Mister. I did not feel served _or_ protected. But while we’re on the topic, why’d you point that ugly pea shooter at me if you were gonna keep the safety on the whole time? I coulda seriously done you some bodily harm, pal!”

“Technically you have done him bodily harm. Look, enough. You need to decide now, while it remains within the scope of your abilities to do so. Will you handle this on your own, unassisted, for the next forty-eight hours or so,” Ivy pauses, giving him time to hear what she’s saying, and adds, more delicately than Harley would’ve, “or do you have someone we can call on your behalf for the next six instead?”

“Or an address,” Harley suggests, revving the engine with her tongue pressed to a chip in her tooth. “I feel like _driving_ tonight.”

Their third passenger hesitates, but not for very long, and rattles off an address. Harley recognizes the street name but can’t place the area right away. It’s not quite the Narrows, but it’s not the city proper, either. It’s someplace in between. Someplace off the grid. Strippers, maybe?

She’s pretty sure he gets what’s at stake here, but just in case he doesn’t, she won’t feel right giving him the wrong idea and taking him somewhere he’ll be hurt worse—

“You get that you’re gonna go alley-cat-in-heat here in a minute, right?”

_“Harley.”_

“I was getting that impression, Quinn,” he grits out, rubbing his shoulders back into the seat. Even in the dark his face is flushed and shining with sweat. “Thanks. Doc, help me out here?”

Harley snaps to attention at the name just as much as Ivy does, but it’s Ivy who removes a darker pink canister from her duffle bag. She tosses it into the backseat, and Super Action Jackson fumbles the catch and sprays himself handily in the face.

“Jesus Christ! _Whoa_ …”

“That should take the edge off. At least until we can get you to your friend,” Ivy tells him, pretty kindly, considering he’s a cop who was trying to arrest them twenty minutes ago. Usually she just gases them on purpose, and damn the consequences.

He flops back onto the seat, blinking dazedly at the ceiling and tonguing at his cheek. “I can feel the lights in my brain.”

“ _I told you_ we should’ve poked around up there,” Harley sighs sulkily.

“Hey, I didn’t have the safety on,” he murmurs sleepily. He pats at his hip where the gun isn’t.

“Whatever you say, pumpkin.” She revs the engine one more time. “Whatever you say.”

—

Bane is reading when he hears the screech of tires and a roaring engine several blocks away. He scans his page and line number to commit them to memory, gently presses the spine closed, and goes to the window to wait.

Without looking just yet, he tracks the direction of the noise according to the city’s grid system. Down to Plymouth Drive. Eastwards toward Tennant Avenue and accelerating from there. Abruptly, a polyphonic call-and-response begins between the initial speeding vehicle and the squad car in pursuit. The din retreats in the opposite direction, looping around the general vicinity of Lennox Boulevard and losing the police tail thereabouts. The rumbling engine drifts near once more.

He brushes aside the burlap drapes in time to see the most ostentatious luxury vehicle he’s ever set eyes on roll to a haphazard stop over top of the sidewalk outside his lodging. It’s painted a screaming canary yellow against Gotham City’s coal black night. The front door swings open. A lone leg kicks out before withdrawing.

He doesn’t normally understand metropolitan customs, but in this instance he really can’t make sense of what he’s looking at.

The rear door on the other side of the car flings itself open, and again, Bane sees the same person from the front seat kick out with one leg. It is his assumption that it’s the same person, anyway, as he can’t imagine any two people in Gotham would be walking around clad in identical trousers such a garish shade of purple.

A woman climbs out of the vehicle headfirst and unrolls onto the pavement in a formless somersault. She lays motionless like the body of Christ shaken free of the cross, and a moment later, the passenger’s side door swings open. Another woman steps out.

Bane recognizes them then by Dr. Isley’s flume of red hair. The woman on the ground must be the enlightened Dr. Quinzel.

Strange, although not untenable. He nearly pulls the curtain closed.

And then, of course, he sees that there is a third person in the car, and rather than avert his gaze, he tears off across the empty apartment and down the three sets of stairs. He flings open the main entrance door, already calling out, “What is the matter with him?”

“Hi, Bane,” Blake answers in a voice his own, but wholly transformed. Honeyed, in a way he takes care never to let it even when they are intimate.

The back of Bane’s neck prickles with suspicion. He assesses the means that have brought Blake here to Bane’s doorstep. Not favorable, undoubtedly, or he would not willingly keep company with two — three — of Gotham’s Most Wanted.

Dr. Isley’s face is calm when he looks to her. Clearly, hers is the voice of reason, and suitably, she has situated herself between the other two. Dr. Quinzel is only beginning to wilt, but Blake looks like a newspaper left out in the rain, all his stark print left to bleed into a muddled, indecipherable blot.

“What is it that ails them?” he asks her, stepping closer but waiting to hear her answer.

“Let’s take a _bubble bath_ when we get home,” Dr. Quinzel pleads, that same strange sweetness that was in Blake’s voice coloring hers. “I want _mozzarella sticks_. Can we get mozzarella sticks on the way? Maybe Ransom likes mozzarella sticks. Such a cutie pie…”

“A fever, of sorts,” Dr. Isley explains, lowering her shoulder so Dr. Quinzel can drape her face more practically against the hollow of Dr. Isley’s neck. “He asked to be brought to you for assistance in managing it.”

“Did he,” Bane muses. “To treat a fever? Curious.”

Dr. Quinzel looks up then, a bright look overtaking her face at the sight of him. _“Bane?_ _That’s_ who you wanna dick down with?”

“Pot, kettle, a bit, Quinn?” Blake snaps, seeming to regain some of his concentration at her comment. The flame high in his cheeks fans a deeper red, and he launches himself in Bane’s direction.

Blake stumbles and nearly falls, but he gets close enough that Bane need not move at all to intercept him from gravity’s lure. The meat of his shoulder is caught easily enough in the clasp of Bane’s hand, and even through his fatuous police-issue garb, his skin gives off a simmering crush of heat.

Bane cannot get a word out before Blake is tucking himself into his neck the same way Dr. Quinzel has burrowed into Dr. Isley’s. Stranger and stranger yet, although not untenable.

He thinks he is beginning to understand.

“He named you before administering the booster dosage,” Dr. Isley informs him, handling Dr. Quinzel with much more ease now that she doesn’t also have to contend with Blake. “Has he chosen correctly?”

“Yes,” Bane replies, appreciative of the courtesy she extends him by asking.

Their paths have crossed before in the natural course of things, his and Dr. Isley’s. Dr. Quinzel has often been a thorn in his side purely for being erratic and mathematically unquantifiable, but Dr. Isley is neither of those things. She is precise and calculated, and it would simply be untrue to suggest that he has never sought out her virtuosity with organic matter as it might pertain to his work.

Fitting, then, that he finds himself holding a beleaguered John Blake as a direct result of that virtuosity. He supposes it strikes a kind of balance, or more likely, they are where they are now because of choices he and Blake made together.

It is all a kind of balance. Action becoming reaction, output to match input. Inertia and heat.

“Thank you, Dr. Isley. I’ll take it from here.”

“Good. Next time it won’t be the pink canister,” she warns, lightly, in Blake’s direction.

“Next time I’ll take the safety off,” he mutters back.

Dr. Quinzel pops her head up. “So you admit it was on! You softy!” she crows, even as Dr. Isley hauls her off in the direction of the car. “That’s what you are, muffin! Soft! Soft as a whoopie pie!”

Dr. Isley gets her settled in her seat and rounds the front of the car to get in on the driver’s side. She tips her head at Bane before driving off.

“God, finally,” Blake groans, just before sinking his teeth into Bane’s neck where his pulse beats out a steady, even staccato. It is more a kiss than a bite, and that, they don’t do either.

“I would hear how the nature of this problem has been explained to you,” Bane says in a meditative sort of voice, bearing the sharp sting at his pulse, and the heat unfurling low in his belly.

“Forty-eight hours seasick or six gagging for it,” Blake explains on a breath. He touches Bane’s arm as if he means to lead him along, and with his mouth still pressed to Bane’s neck, he adds, “I picked the second one. Thought you might go for it.”

In a fit of charitable whimsy, Bane allows himself to be moved. He strolls comfortably alongside Blake’s loose-limbed saunter, musing, “Six hours. Quite a long time to be without relief in the event that I had not been available for your devices.”

“Not as long as forty-eight,” he mutters blandly, thumping the toe of his boot against the bottom step of the stairwell and dropping his head to stare down at it.

Bane doesn’t wait for him to ask. He hefts Blake over his shoulder and begins the ascent up the first flight of stairs, listening all the while for Blake to verbalize his outrage over being carried. When only silence greets him, and not of an agreeable sort that he can abide, he bounces the bundle on his shoulder, to piteous groaning.

“You have to be nice to me,” Blake grouses.

Cheerfully, Bane answers, “I must be more than nice to you, John Blake. I must be responsible for you. You have seen to that.”

If Blake replies after that, Bane cannot hear him over the echo within the cavernous stairwell.

—

John blinks through the fever cloud swallowing him up. Somewhere in the runoff, he knows Bane’s nearby. He can’t have gone far since John complained about his bad attitude.

If things were the other way around, or if there weren’t any accidental drugs involved, they’d probably still be doing this since it’s not like a lack of surprise drugging hasn’t stopped them from tearing at each other in the past.

A solid pressure eases over his throat, giving him a taste of relief. He swallows thickly, throat bobbing beneath that heavy palm. His blood roils.

Above him, sound. Sound and…

“Huh?”

“Say in words what you would like for me to do,” Bane says, not for the first time, John doesn’t think. He eases his hand over John’s collar bone, and further down, slipping beneath his shirt to cover his racing heartbeat. “It cannot be my idea. Do you understand?”

Clutching Bane’s hand and shivering hard, he grits out, “It’s not like you’ve never touched me.”

Bane inches his hand lower, lower, until John can arch his back into the knots beneath his knuckles. They roll in a sweet cascade over John’s nipple, setting his nerves all alight with wanting. A sharp, high cry breaks in his mouth. The pillar of his body poised patiently between John’s quaking thighs runs _hot, hot, hot_. Bane’s fingers circle and pinch and _twist,_ clever and deft, and John spasms hard, loving it, needing more of it, needing the friction more than he needs air in his lungs.

John could cry, it feels so good. Words froth out of him, and in his haze, he traps himself in his half-loosed jacket and popped off two of the buttons at his collar. His dumb ass hat is still hanging there, cocked at such a jaunty fucking angle John has a spare second to be embarrassed.

Through the cluster fuck that is John’s fumbled attempt to undress himself, Bane stands back watching. Crow’s feet spread at the corners of his eyes. They’re sweet eyes, when he’s not threatening murder or mass destruction.

When he’s looking at someone or something he half gives a shit about, Bane doesn’t look like a scary guy at all. Not even with the anglerfish grille on his mask doing most of the talking for him. Except, actually, John knows — and most people would, if they paid any kind of real attention to Bane — that he doesn’t count on the mask to speak for him. If anything, he counts on its machinelike silence to suggest its own story.

“You’ve yet to convey to me how I might best attend to you,” Bane reminds him, jovial, amused, not cold or unfeeling, not made of stone. No matter what he lets people think.

“Get this off me,” John slurs, and it comes out sibilant like one many-syllabled word.

Bane peels the jacket off him and waits to be asked to send John’s button-up the same way. He drapes the dark heavy jacket neatly over his arm, folds John’s shirt one-handed, and sets it over the top of his jacket, gently, like they’re alive and awake to know that he’s handled them with care.

John’s mind whirs. He wants to say, _kiss me, bite me, put your tongue everywhere your hands have been._

The conflict of wanting the impossible must be evident in John’s face because Bane hums, thoughtful, and soothes his hand right the way over John’s throat again. It helps, a little, the heat and pressure of him. He’s not feverish like John is, but he’s starting to be able to tell that that doesn’t mean Bane isn’t running hot, too.

“What I want,” John says, rolling the sounds around in his mouth, wanting to confess the rest. What would be the harm in wanting to be kissed and bitten and tasted and _eaten up?_ But still the admission catches on the tips of his teeth, worried that — what? That Bane’s feelings will be hurt? That he’ll be ashamed to be found wanting? No, John thinks, and says, without meaning to, “You won’t be mad?”

Bane’s hand eases where it had been a pleasant, warming weight. The creases framing his eyes loosen. He says, serious as the grave, “No, John.”

“Not even if I asked you to kiss me?”

He hears a fluttered puff of air, a short, soft laugh that filters through the tubes in Bane’s mask. The crinkling reappears. “I never took you to be dreadfully sentimental.”

“I’m not,” John insists, enough in his head now that he can find something to complain about.

“If that’s what you would have,” Bane muses, softly, like the smallest embers of a great fire.

He feathers the tips of his fingers up John’s throat and teases the point of his chin. The barest graze of his knuckles beneath John’s lip sends a wave of goosebumps down his arms. Bane presses two fingers flush to his bottom lip so that his mouth falls open and holds there, teasing.

John darts his tongue out just enough to touch, buzzing with need and excitement. He doesn’t nip or suck or any of the things he wants to do, wanting only to see what Bane will do.

His fingertips smooth across John’s upper lip, the two moving in counterpoint to trace the symmetrical curves in his mouth. They’re still wet enough to slide easily over John’s bottom lip, too, and it’s close enough to what he wants that his heavy-lidded eyes slip shut.

Bane applies the barest amount of pressure, again, only feeling out what John will accept, what he’ll encourage, what he’ll go wild for, and John gives him that in spades. He lets his mouth fall open. Another huff of air, this time with sound riding the exhale, catches in Bane’s vocal modulator. Heat suffuses John’s spine, turning him liquid, boiling, and evaporating him into steam. He sets his tongue against the single arc of Bane’s fingers, holds a moment, just one, before hollowing his cheeks and sucking hard.

A groan breaks free, and Bane matches him, eyes gone dark and intense. He holds his thumb fast underneath John’s chin and gently coaxes his mouth open wider. John doesn’t fight him. He doesn’t think he would anyway, _fuck,_ he’s so hot. _He’s_ _on fire_.

“Bane,” John sighs, half-obstructed by the fingers in his mouth, but not silenced. Never that. “Please…”

“Please, what?” Bane rasps without removing his fingers from John’s mouth.

He bobs his head a few times on Bane’s fingers, knowing damn well what it looks like he’s asking for because he knows Bane’s got something considerably more satisfying than fingers for John to wrap his lips around. He waits for Bane to look up from the seal of his lips at the root of his knuckles and lets go.

Gentle, always gentle, Bane takes his fingers away, deliberately, so that a string of spit stretches, stretches, and snaps. A speck of it hits John’s chin. They stare at each other, both of them breathing faster.

“Lemme get my mouth on you,” John whispers, thrilling when Bane doesn’t make him ask twice.

—

John Blake is a curiosity, an anomaly, a miracle, and a gift. His mouth, Bane has often noted with varying degrees of bemusement, is a wonder all its own.

He has folded himself nearly in half on the squat, simple table to choke himself on Bane’s cock. His close-cut hair evades capture in the mallet of Bane’s fist, but it is soft where it escapes through the spaces between his fingers.

He is louder than normal tonight, uninhibited in his need, though he is usually demanding, particularly when he doesn’t immediately get his way.

Bane enjoys the extremes in his temperament. He delights in giving Blake pleasure and rendering him insensate with it. There is much gratification to be found in dashing apart Blake’s rigid control. If all his groaning is any indication, Blake feels similarly. He comes up for air a moment later, gasping, and drops his forehead against Bane’s shoulder. The corner of his hat bumps Bane’s chin and flies off.

He keeps twisting his hand furiously to fan the flame in Bane’s belly while he catches his breath. It feels good, to be close to him, to feel how his body trembles, to hear the air stick in the back of his throat.

“Talk to me,” Blake whispers after a time. “Let me hear you.”

Bane’s mind has been pleasantly blank for the last few minutes, so he conceives of something worth hearing and recites, _“Entre labios y labios hay como por una costa / de arena y vidrio, pasa el viento—”_

“That’s pretty,” Blake mumbles sweetly into the pulse at his neck.

Having already forgotten what he was in the middle of saying, Bane compromises with a vague, agreeable hum. Blake slows his hand. Using his mouth on Bane seems to have taken the urgency out of his fever, though his appetite remains.

It leaves him clear-headed enough to ask, “What does it mean?”

“What?”

Blake’s smile precedes a flick of his tongue and then a burning kiss at Bane’s throat. He wilts lower, sucking more kisses, to his sternum, to the hot bud of his nipple, to his navel, to his hip, and finally back where Bane most wants him. “What you said,” Blake prompts him, lapping leisurely at his tip of his weeping cock. “Lips and lips? My Spanish is sort of rusty.”

“Neruda,” Bane sighs, gasping at Blake’s clever lips and tongue. _“Por eso eres sin fin, recógeme como si fueras / toda solemnidad, toda… nocturna / como u-una zona, hasta que te c-confundas / con las líneas del… líneas —_ John…”

 _“Fuck!”_ John cries out, letting Bane splash him with his spend. “Fuck, touch me. Touch me, come on.”

“You might’ve asked before unmaking me,” Bane croaks, but he does as commanded and crushes Blake into his arms, half-falling with him down onto the floor.

If he’s alarmed, he doesn’t complain. He simply stretches himself out next to Bane and pulls at his shoulder until he rolls toward him, pliant but harder to move for it. It’s fairly obvious to him what John wants, but he waits to be asked, and though John snaps at him more than he asks, he takes the meaning well enough.

It’s the work of one sinuous movement becoming another. Heat and slick motion and desperation breaking in John’s voice when he comes noisily beneath Bane’s hand. 

They don’t normally make a mess, of the flat or of each other or of themselves.

“Did you really recite a poem in Spanish while I was blowing you,” John teases, sounding more elated than anything else.

Bane blinks and has the sliding realization that it feels slow and tenebrous. Sweetened.

“Yes,” he says, breathing in deeply to fill his lungs, feeling and tasting the cold bitterness in the back of his mouth. He holds his hand up in front of his face, aware of how much warmer the prints in his fingers and the swooping lines in his palm feel. How they seem to vibrate. “Oh.”

“Hmm? What?” John asks, tracing an idle figure eight down Bane’s exposed hip. He looks up, eyes stalling for a long moment on Bane’s eyes. His eyebrows twitch. “Do you feel okay?”

Nodding, Bane murmurs, “Yes.”

John licks his lips uncertainly. His eyes are brighter than they have been, more rooted in the moment. He nods, too, that brilliant, complex mind of his working, turning, connecting fragments to make a whole. “You know… Harley wasn’t dosed like I was. She wasn’t — _dosed_.”

“It would explain—” Bane stops, unsure how to say it.

“Is it like melting? Like sugar burning?”

 _What a way to put it,_ Bane thinks. And also, _You are like sugar burning, John Blake_.

“Nah, I’m not so sweet,” John answers, like he doesn’t mean to be charmed by the sentiment. “Shit, well… _shit,”_ he repeats, feelingly, under his breath. “Okay, well, maybe your mask’ll counteract some of it?”

“It isn’t so bad. Do not trouble yourself.”

“Mmm, um…” John closes his eyes and rubs his hand over his mouth. He sighs sharply, looking down at his lap accusingly a moment later. “Oh, my God, she really meant six hours.”

“Doctors aren’t in the habit of misrepresenting themselves, little bird,” Bane says on an exhale, letting his eyes drift closed. It’s a curious thing, this sensation. Like being in free fall, that moment the ground breaks away and the dimensions of his body cease to carry meaning in a way he can control. “Competent doctors, I should say.”

“Are you— no, I guess not, right? You didn’t get a second dose.”

“Ask what you thought to ask,” Bane beseeches him, laying his head back to the clasps of his mask dig neatly into his skin.

“Are you hard again, Bane. I was gonna ask if you’re hard again.”

Bane cracks an eye open and basks for a moment in the sulking set to John’s mouth. He can understand his earlier fixation, studying the bitten red of those lips he’s touched and felt all over his body, with the exception of his own two lips, and isn’t that a thought, to find himself wanting such a thing…

“I enjoy giving you pleasure,” Bane protests, lips brushing in a smile against the interior mesh lining over his respirator. “John— ”

He looks up, immediately stilling his hands where he’d been pulling at Bane’s opened pants. He stares innocently, blinking once, twice, and says, “What?”

“There is a bed in the other room.”

A rash of red spreads up the proud column of John’s neck and across his nose. He nods, eyes big and round in his blushing face. Eventually, unwillingly, he casts a look around the meager kitchen. His own speedily discarded clothes have come unspooled from their neat, tight folds and sit in sloppy piles on either side of them.

“Okay,” he says finally, taking his hands away from Bane’s unfastened belt. “Let’s go.”

—

Harley’s fuzzy on the details for a while after dropping Detective Sweet Face off with Big Bad Baney Boy, but she knows one minute she’s typing the caption “LOCAL MAN TAKES A BITE OUTTA CRIME” on her instagram story and the next she’s blinking awake. A soft, scrunchy nose nudges her cheek. She opens her eyes, and everything’s green.

Directly above her, once her vision clears a bit more, she can make out stars beyond smudged, misty glass. Nestled in the crook of her neck is a fluffy, wriggly rabbit she remembers in stages.

“Heya, Raaaansom, you… handsome…” she mumbles, turning her face so he won’t snuffle right into her eye quite so much. “Hmm, Ransom? Where’d Ivy go?”

His whiskers twitch at her cheek. He nips at her nose pointedly.

“Honk,” she says gamely.

“You’re coherent,” Ivy notes, walking into the room with her lab coat swishing at her heels. “That’s good. Ransom, no. What did we talk about?”

She scoops him up and brushes gently at his nose. A dusting of bright yellow flakes flutters off his nose. His little whiskers twitch again, and he sneezes. It’s a distinctively macho sneeze, like something you’d hear from a biker with a beer belly, and it makes Harley laugh. She thinks about the tiny little tank they snatched him up from and the many petri dishes surrounding him just teeming with live cells.

Maybe they were trying to give him superpowers, but they gave him super sneezing instead? Superpowers work like that sometimes. Just look at Discount Ryan Reynolds with the shiny alien ring or whatever. Yikes.

Ivy comes back a moment later without Ransom or his man-sneezes. She collects a few mason jars off a nearby desk, holding them in one arm while she walks a tight circle of the room plucking leaves or pinching flower buds between her fingers. When she’s got everything she needs to be satisfied, she comes and sits crisscross applesauce next to Harley on the floor.

There’s a thrumming in Harley’s skin, very faint, thanks to the cold goop crusting into flakes behind her ear and in her hair. She remembers how it worked on Officer Blue Balls, how he got hot under the collar right away. It hadn’t been funny when it was him, but she wishes she could laugh at how she feels now. That buzzing, writhing itch for pressure, for just one full breath outside the weight of this thing taking up real estate in her chest.

“Didja figure out the cure?” she asks in a feathery voice, trying not to let on how— how _ugly_ it feels, not to like what her skin wants. She’s only ever felt this way one other time, and it—

But Ivy starts mixing things together in a bowl, growing a luminous stalk of some unbelievable flower from the center of her palm while Harley watches, breathless. Without looking up from the mash of stuff in her little bowl, she says, in a drone-y, science-y kinda voice Harley _loves_ , “The _Hygrophila spinosa_ broke your fever, and the _Ocimum sanctum_ seems to be counteracting some of the dizziness, I think. There’s a few more possibles I want to try.”

“Or you could just gimme the second dose,” Harley teases, and doesn’t mean it, doesn’t mean it at all, but she has to smile, _has to laugh,_ or else… then it’ll hurt for real.

Ivy looks up then, sexy librarian glasses sliding down her nose. Her eyes are soft but serious, the way they usually are, no matter how crazy the night gets, no matter how crazy Harley gets, and she murmurs, “No, Harley.”

It shouldn’t spark such immediate and overwhelming relief, but Harley closes her eyes against the swell of it, against what it means to be in capable hands for once. With someone who doesn’t wanna hurt her. Not for sport, not for shits and giggles, not to prove that they can. Ivy’s never like that. Not ever.

Well, she is, but only when it’s goons and meatheads and cops, and even then, she’s got standards. Ivy’s a classy girl.

“Harley,” she whispers, thumbing away a big fat streak of tears that’s just gotta be ruining her makeup. She thumbs the other side, too, using the same hand so she won’t smear dirt and crushed up plants all over Harley’s face. “Harley, will you let me try to fix this?”

The waterworks just open up even worse hearing that, the way Ivy still manages to make it sound like a question, even though she’s the one putting her foot down and saying no for both of them. She sniffles loudly and nods, not trusting her voice in this moment, but trusting Ivy to know what she means. Ivy presses a soft, cool kiss to her forehead, keeping her one hand against her cheek and smearing a mess of sloppy dirt and leaves against her throat. It cools just like Ivy’s kiss, and soothes the same way.

“Sorry I’m no fun, babe,” she creaks out in a pathetic little whisper, managing a wobbly smile.

“Don’t apologize,” Ivy croons, smelling like sun warmed pottery and honey and life. “I’m the stick in the mud. You’re hell on wheels.”

Harley laughs, twisting a little and reaching up to boop the glowing yellow flower growing out of Ivy’s hand. It unfurls the rest of the way to show an even brighter center, like a pearl. Ivy plucks it and grinds it up in her bowl along with the rest of it.

“Ain’t your planties gonna hold it against you that you’re mushing ‘em up for little ol’ me?”

“Hmm,” Ivy hums, brushing a lock of vibrant red hair behind her ear and smearing dirt in a streak along her cheek. “No, they know what purpose they serve. No part of them is wasted. How does that feel? Better? The same?”

“Better,” Harley says, and she does mean it. She means the wide, toothy grin, too.

Ivy looks at her steadily, gauging her answer for a long few seconds, and finally nods solemnly. She cracks the world’s smallest smile and dabs the spot behind Harley’s other ear with the stuff. It’s cool, cool, and feels like sleepiness, that’s how good it is. Harley drops her shoulders and stops gritting her teeth. She takes a full deep breath, feeling it more and more how much of her body really feels like her and no one else.

“Okay, talk me through it. How do you feel?” Ivy asks, serious as ever, already looking around at the rest of the greenhouse. “Describe it to me.”

“Still kinda bouncy,” Harley starts, thinking, biting her lip. “But sleepy.”

Ivy nods and kisses her forehead again. “Keep talking. I’ll be close by.”

Harley keeps right on talking. Just a constant steady babble of adjectives and feelings while Ivy fusses around quietly and methodically collecting things. She’s so cool, Ivy is. She’s so smart and so capable and so good.

And Harley’s so lucky.

—

John loses track of his uniform in between the kitchen and the bedroom. Or well, it’s not much of a bedroom. The collection of rooms Bane keeps up at this location tend more towards open concept than someplace people are actually meant to live. That there’s a bed in the room he leads Bane into is the only thing that makes it a bedroom, and even then, John sort of doubts he actually sleeps in it. Whatever. They’re gonna get more than enough use out of it tonight.

Bane waits for John to climb up onto the bed first before following him into it. He lets John run point, while he’s coherent enough in between orgasms to say what he wants and how he wants it. What he wants now, as long as he’s the only one who’s hard, is Bane’s fingers opening him up. They're thick inside him, calloused in a different way from the mounts of his palm, and all the friction he needs in all the right places.

He’s as slow as John wants, and then as fast as John wants, and his eyes go heavy and hooded at the hand John shoots down to wrap around himself. It’s embarrassing how much noise he makes, but there’s no room in his head to think about it.

Bane’s pressing something warm and soft to his stomach when his head clears. He gives him a few more passes with it before slipping away.

“Where’re you going…?” John mumbles, throwing his arm over his face. “Hey…”

He doesn’t know how long he lays there, but it feels like forever. His skin’s already burning up again by the time Bane comes back to him.

“Drink.”

John doesn’t wanna drink at all. He’s pretty sure if his lips touch it, it’ll just evaporate right there in his mouth. He turns his head away, digging into the mattress with his shoulders.

On second thought, maybe Bane does sleep in this bed. It’s miserable enough to suit his asceticism. His usual asceticism. That he normally practices, when he’s not powering through marathon sex with John in a drug-induced haze.

“John,” he says, wrapping his big hand around the back of John’s neck and sparking awareness back into his brain. “Drink.”

He turns his head where Bane wants him and lets the water slip down his throat. It’s so cold swallowing it almost hurts, and contrary to what John expected, it doesn’t burst into steam once it hits his mouth.

Bane doesn’t let up, so John compromises and clamps his own hand around Bane’s so he’ll squeeze and knead at John’s burning skin while John makes himself drink.

It’s not what he wants. It’s not enough it’s not enough it’s not enough it’s not —

“A little more,” Bane murmurs, pausing when John squirms out of his hold and spills a glug of water down his chin. He draws his fingers down over John’s throat and spreads them deliberately so that his palm spans the breadth of his neck, fingers tapering over one side and thumb nestled in at his thundering pulse. “Drink, and I will take care of you.”

John meets his eyes and holds himself still except for the rapid rise and fall of his chest. He nods and parts his lips for the canteen. He can taste the metal this time, flat and cold against his lip. Bane keeps his hand where it is, maybe counting how many times John’s Adam’s apple jumps beneath his hand. His eyes, even from behind his mask, are warm, tickled at John’s impatience.

“You had less time in between spells this round,” Bane remarks, holding John’s eyes all the while. “Do you feel differently?”

“Not right now, I don't,” John sputters, batting away the canteen when he drains it down to the last few drops. “Get down here. _Get down here_. _Don’t go again_ —”

It’s all mush after that. He knows Bane’s on him and pressing his fingers where John wants them, and when orgasm knocks him back on his ass, he doesn’t have to bully Bane into staying with him. The closeness helps keep the crawling feeling out of his skin, though he didn’t really think it would.

“Must try and get something in your stomach,” Bane says on a sigh. He sounds— more distorted than usual.

“Are you doing okay?”

“Yes, John.”

“Really? Because you seem out of it.”

He hums, a ponderous sound, heavy but weightless, like turbulence. John sits up and rubs the back of his hand over his forehead. There’s a thin layer of sweat and just… _spunk_ all over him, it feels like. He’s gonna have to hose himself down later, scrub his skin raw getting the fucking jizz off. Jesus Christ.

“Ugh, God.”

“Yes,” Bane sighs, pressing his hand to his own chest and bearing down.

“Hey. Bane, look at me. Look. What do you need? What’re you feeling? Talk to me.”

“Vapors,” he rasps, and there it is again, that warbled edge to his voice.

“Vapors,” John repeats stupidly, and then his eyes catch on the complicated, vicious wiring in Bane’s mask. “ _Vapors_. Okay. Okay… Bane? Tell me how to help you. Gimme something to do here. Do you need more of something? Do you need less? What?”

Bane cracks an eye open to look at him. He soothes that spot over his heart again, gentler this time, and wheezes, “Yes.”

John blinks, mouth flapping, and says, “That doesn’t clarify anything for me, man.”

But it must for Bane because his eyes, always expressive, crinkle in a laugh for just a moment, and then he reaches under his chin, twisting something, twisting, _no,_ fumbling, reaching and missing. John touches his hand carefully, telegraphing his every move so Bane won’t think he's up to no good.

There’s a held breath, just one, and then Bane’s taking his hand away so John can try.

“Seek the gears,” Bane advises shakily. “There are four. Turn them as you would a key.”

To look at them, they’re nondescript, totally unremarkable, but once he has one between his fingers, he knows exactly what it’ll do. He hesitates, eyes jumping uncertainly to Bane’s. “Really?” he asks.

Bane nods, and when John listens, he can hear that his breathing is threadier than it should be. He nods back, decided if Bane is, and turns the gear.

A hydraulic hiss seeps from the opened chamber. John finds the next one easily, thanks to how they predictably follow the horseshoe of Bane’s mandible. They pop open with steadier and steadier sips of loosening air.

“Behind,” Bane tells him, and the quality of his voice is softer, hoarse in the way John has come to expect, but smoother without the mask augmenting it.

John feels along the contoured straps to the back. Now that his hands know what he’s looking for, he finds the gears almost instinctively. There are two more on either side and one by itself at the very back. He grazes the edge of a deep, corded scar with the tip of his pinky finger, and as close as he is, he can feel how that tiny gasp of a touch makes Bane shiver.

At the final gear, the structural integrity of the mask wobbles and sags. With the bones gone out of it, it looks more like a muzzle than ever before.

John licks his lips, catching himself stuck between breaths. “You want it all the way off?”

Bane turns his head toward John, blinking slowly, and whispers, “Yes, John.”

John gives him what he wants and peels it away. It’s heavier than he thought it would be, and it comes away like something you’d fish out of the gutters with a stick after a big storm. Like something that feels like trash until you get it rotated around the correct way and it turns out to be a waterlogged rat.

He doesn’t know where the thought comes from. He doesn’t hate the mask when Bane’s wearing it, when it’s just another part of him, but he’d never thought of it as something that could be removed. Now that he’s stripping it off, though, he feels, what? Pity?

For the pain to warrant a constant stream of meds and restraint, it must be unspeakable. Parts of Bane’s skin are irritated from where the leather’s bitten into it. Everything about it looks like it hurts.

“John?”

The mask is in his hand, and he hasn’t quite given up studying the unforgiving snarl of tubes that comprises its architecture when he hears the whisper of sheets sliding against skin.

Bane rolls his shoulders, stretching his muscles against cotton. John looks up at him. _And looks._

“What the fuck,” he breathes.

“Am I not to your liking?” Bane teases, the motherfucker.

John very carefully sets the mask down on the nightstand. He does this pretty adroitly for someone who can’t tear his eyes away from the plush, stupid mouth suddenly on display for him. Slowly, articulately, he says, “How are your lips so _shiny?”_

“Vapors,” Bane explains, holding his hand out, fingers fanned loosely toward his palm. He waits for John to lace their fingers together, eyes drifting closed at the contact. Sighing again, he says, “They are restorative, in moderation. In excess, it would seem they have the opposite effect.”

“Ivy’s thing slowed you down, but your meds were still going at regular speed?” John guesses.

Bane hums, giving John’s hand one solid squeeze. “I would like to feed you now if you are amenable.”

“Oh, yeah? Is that what you’d like?”

“Before you are given over to apoplexy,” Bane murmurs, eyes still closed.

“How’s that gonna work?” John asks idly, innocently, tracing the tip of his finger beneath the line of Bane’s lip. “You’re falling asleep, and if I get up without you I’ll turn into a drooling idiot before I clear the room.”

“Then I must not fall asleep,” he says, with a little harrumph, but he doesn’t move to sit up. He does open his eyes at least, and when they crease at the corners, John knows to drop his eyes and look for the matching smile.

“Piece of shit,” he huffs, smiling, meaning anything but _piece of shit_.

“I have chosen an unkind paramour,” Bane laments sleepily, letting his eyes slip closed again.

“Didn’t know that’s how you thought of me.”

“Inamorato,” he mumbles, turning his face into John’s hand so that his fingers smooth over his mouth and chin. “Swain. Lover.”

John huffs a laugh, circling one finger against the inside curl of Bane’s lip, where the skin is slick and sensitive. “Your lover, huh?”

“Do you imagine I take many partners to bed?”

“Are you gonna be offended to hear that I do?”

“No,” Bane sighs, eyes drifting open again. “It is the way in your culture to drink of many springs.”

“What’s the way in yours?” John asks, curious, pressing down with the pad of his finger just enough that his lip gives beneath it.

“To remember that all water is life-giving,” Bane says, and seals his lips around the tip of John’s finger. He sucks lightly and parts them again so he can speak. He whispers, “To never abuse it or take it for granted.”

“I can get behind that.” John bites his lip, warm at the imagery, at the thought of Bane’s mouth as a spring he might drink from. “Can I kiss you? I’m gonna ask later, and I’d… I’d rather it be now, first. While I can think.”

“As would I, and so you may.”

John bends down to press his mouth to Bane’s. He could lose himself in the crush of their lips so easily, letting gravity sink his body deeper, heavier, softer. Bane’s soap and rain smell tastes more like menthol and the acrid burn of a sapped battery right at his mouth, but John licks inside anyway, tentative, searching as much as he’s asking, and Bane lets him in.

His tongue is shy against John’s, learning, and that just makes John more careful with him, makes him savor every sensation of his mouth. Bane’s hands come up to frame John’s face, tattered but even breaths passing between their mouths, between kisses. John catches his lip neatly between his teeth and sucks it into his mouth.

Bane gasps into his mouth, a soft, helpless sound, and John’s whole body lights up. He doesn’t make any progress getting John food this round.

It’s too bad. Really.

(It’s not.)

—

She slips in through the unlatched window, silent as death and decisive as a nail breaking the earth. A fluid glance about her surroundings tells her only that she’s chosen the correct safe house, if perhaps not the most ideal time. She smoothes her fingertips and then the flat of her hand along the neatly maintained cover of a well-loved book.

The original Arabic winks up at her, playful for a book of elegies. Of course Bane would prefer Al-Khansā’ in her own words, distilled from the source and untarnished by the efforts of translation.

His rooms are silent, but standing still within it, holding her hand to the pulse of where she can imagine him last, she can make out whispers. Not of language, but of breath and linens, the trussing and motion of ardor.

Lovemaking, or the other sort? Curious, she moves toward the music of it.

Her shadow bleeds into the darkness of the hallway, the heart of the night. The door to the room that breathes and roils has been left flung open on its hinges, and so she waits there, watching their bodies entangle. Their hands and their mouths.

 _Lovemaking,_ she decides, carried by the notion into a soft, true smile.

Strange that he has yet to detect her presence, but of course, the thought blooming in her mind pulls his awareness in her direction, and he looks over, not seeming to understand what or who he is looking at until his eyes adjust. Stranger, still. All of it is strange, but she will allow him his indulgences where he endeavors to take them. She has never known him to care for indulgences at all, so to know now that he does, that he might know happiness in vulnerability and delight in the closeness of it, gives her such joy.

“Talia,” he says, finally, with his voice stripped down.

The man poised over him looks over as well, blinks slowly, and dives down to Bane’s other side in a charming display of shame. It is a sentiment not shared by her brother. He sits up, beleaguered but determined to meet her, and only halts in his progress when the man beside him slaps a possessive hand over his wrist. That is charming, too.

“Take a few minutes to compose yourself, brother,” she soothes, switching in the middle of the sentence to Italian, “What I seek from you will keep at least that long.”

He tips his chin in a nod, holding her eyes for a moment across a chasm of shadows. His features are lovely. She might have guessed. Behind him, his paramour makes a quiet sound of complaint, and whatever meaning it holds, Bane twists his body around to look at him.

“Already?” he asks.

“Ugh, no,” groans the man, perhaps covering his mouth with his hand for how muffled it comes out. He drags it away and groans again, hoarse and questing. “ _Yes_. Damn it…”

Talia steps out of the doorway and pulls it firmly, quietly shut behind her.

—

John doesn’t make a sound. He’s not _gonna_ make a sound. _He isn’t gonna make a single fucking sound._

“Quiet,” Bane whispers, lips at the head of John’s dick.

 _“I am,”_ John snaps, twisting and groaning and snapping his mouth shut when he catches himself at it. “Just, oh, come on, _come on, yeah, like that, fuck_ …”

John mostly doesn’t make a sound. He has enough presence of mind after to feel properly embarrassed this time around, though, and that’s no fun. Talia _must_ have heard them.

Jesus, Bane has to be the only person John knows with scary assassin ladies on his list of known associates who can just drop into his apartment when he’s in the middle of insane episodic sex with a fucking cop. Why wouldn’t he. Seriously.

Going out to face her is unavoidable, but at least he can think and at least he’s wearing pants. Bane had nearly gone out buck-ass-naked, and as much as John was kind of really enjoying the view, he put a stop to it pretty quickly and threw a pair of sweatpants at his head.

Now he’s sitting at the table with his arm around Bane’s back just for the friction and making himself eat from the tray set out for him. Just a few dried dates at first, then a banana. He watches Talia the whole time.

She and Bane talk for a while in Italian before switching into what John thinks might be Hebrew. It’s kind of soothing, actually, listening to their soft voices go and go and go and never falter between dialects.

He has no idea what the hell they’re talking about, especially once their hushed exchange shifts from Hebrew to something he can’t identify at all. It’s almost flattering that they switch so much for his benefit, though he can’t say how much of it Talia really even thinks he’s capable of piecing together. Still, it’s nice to be considered enough of a threat to merit the subterfuge. Or whatever.

John eats his fruit and doesn’t sulk. _He doesn’t_.

Then, miraculously, she eases effortlessly into French, and it catches in John’s ears. He tries not to flinch or give any indication that he can follow what they’re saying but carefully files away some detail about a freight ship at the docks carrying exports she won’t refer to by name. He’s halfway through an apple when he realizes they’ve been in French for a suspiciously long time and looks up.

Talia’s dark eyes, focused in on him, glitter even in the dark. She smiles, languid and lovely and completely in control of the room. She says, in English, “Did you get all of that, Detective?”

“Talia,” Bane chides, sounding just as amused as she is.

John _doesn’t sulk._ Goddamn it.

“Are you guys done scheming or what?” he grouses, taking a huge savage bite of his apple.

“I see why you like him, brother,” she teases, in French again, just to be obnoxious.

Bane pats John’s back when he chokes and leaves his hand where it is even after the coughing fit subsides. For the first time since John’s been loosely monitoring their conversation, Bane changes languages before Talia does, to say something in another tongue John can’t guess at. It’s pretty, when he uses it, philosophical and deliberate. But that’s probably just Bane’s way of talking in general because the same language is swift and energetic in Talia’s mouth.

John shakes his head, irritated at her whole existence and even more irritated that she hasn’t exactly given him a real reason to dislike her, and makes himself finish his plate. Just as he’s chewing off the stem of an orange pith, heat spreads low in his gut and shimmers up his spine.

He drops the orange peel and presses his forehead to Bane’s bare shoulder to hide his shudder. His skin’s hot and smells like John as much as it does like him.

Bane’s hand migrates up to the back of John’s neck and squeezes. He says, “Now?”

John wants to sass him and say something clever like, _Hey, no, whenever’s good for you. Don’t go out of your way or anything_ , but all that comes out when he tries is a throaty kind of hum that’s too close to a groan for his liking.

If Talia’s offended, she shows no sign of it. She murmurs for Bane’s ears only, something that sounds like Italian but that John doesn’t think actually is Italian.

When he looks up again, she’s gone. He never even heard her going.

“She’s not really hijacking a freighter at the docks, is she?” John mumbles, smearing a kiss along the line of Bane’s shoulder.

“No, John,” he muses, threading his fingers through John’s hair.

“Hmm. Figures.” He nuzzles his face into the firm muscle at Bane’s back, groaning more openly now that they don’t have an audience. His skin’s burning up in waves, slow, lilting pulses washing up the length of his body. “Okay. Take me to bed.”

Bane hums and turns sideways on his chair to look right at John, a sly, pleased smile on his sly, gorgeous mouth. John leans in and bites him, tasting only sweet and citrus.

—

John is loose and wet and wrung out by the time Bane finds himself hard again. He has scarcely managed to reach for the third towel of the night when John climbs on top of him.

“Not yet,” he pants, balancing both hands on Bane’s chest, eyes closed. “Just wanted to say it.”

Bane pets a hand down the curve of John’s sweat-slick back. “Then say it.”

“Fuck me,” John whispers, opening his eyes and shifting a little in Bane’s lap. “ _Ugh,_ not— not yet. Not… just gimme a minute to…”

“As you will it.”

“Don’t you want to?” he asks a second later, bumping Bane’s temple so that his drenched hair sticks to his skin, too. “No, I meant— do you? We won’t if… if you don’t.”

“I want to,” Bane assures him, running his hands down in an unbroken line and scooping up the towel before John notices his hand straying. He gives him a few gentle passes with it..

John hums, nodding leisurely. He reigns in his breathing but dithers a while, not moving. “Hey,” he mumbles, after a time. “What was the poem? Earlier, when you… the one in Spanish. Lips and lips?”

Bane recalls the line that sprang unbidden into his mind, and why. He repeats it in English.

_“Between lips and lips, as if along a coast / of sand and glass, the wind passes. / That is why you are endless, gather me up as if you were / all solemnity, all nocturnal / like a zone, until you merge / with the lines of time. / Advance in sweetness, come to my side until the digital / leaves of the violins / have become silent, until the moss / takes root in the thunder, until from the throbbing / of hand and hand the roots come down.”_

The liquid splay of John’s limbs never once coils with tension. He merely listens, the strings of his body shorn with exhaustion. In spite of his fatigue, his mind is nowhere else but with Bane. His attention is on Bane. His slowing heartbeat is with Bane. His hands that relax one tendon and joint at a time are with Bane.

“That’s really beautiful,” he murmurs into the rising silence that is not a wall but a cloud.

“Then it is suited to you,” Bane teases, but John only grins, shaking his head.

“You’re sure the sex part of what I got isn’t rubbing off on you?” he says, but it sits like an honest question masquerading itself in the armor of humor.

“I need no help from substances to find you as lovely as you are.”

“That’s really not what I…” he mutters, voice trailing off into a bewildered silence. The color is high still in his face, but there is a slackening to his features that conveys every bit of his heart. “It’s just we don’t do this, usually. I mean, fall into bed, sure. That’s nothing new.”

“This is our first time sharing a bed,” Bane points out judiciously.

“Yes, okay,” John allows, waving his hand as if to clear smoke. “Okay, walls are more our speed. Desks. There was that one time in a car, and then again in that big armchair… But that’s what I mean, we don’t — do this. We don’t talk like this. W-we’re not… _sweet_ to each other.”

“We do speak, on occasion,” Bane reminds him, fisting the proof of John’s growing malady, and sure enough, his sentences get shorter.

“About the weather,” John grits out, closing his eyes and meeting Bane’s hand with clever twists of his hips. “About my job that you think is stupid—”

“I appreciate your attitude toward the work,” Bane interrupts him to say. “However, I find it difficult to reconcile the purpose of your carrying a weapon in the safety position.”

John bites Bane’s cheek where the strap of his mask normally obscures and presses the skin. He says, “S-safety. For safety.”

“For whom, John? Not for you.”

“You get that— _oh…”_ he drops his head to Bane’s shoulder and reaches down to clutch Bane’s wrist to hold him in place. “Most people that— that have the cops called on them are just… just sick or doped up on something or… didn’t do anything wrong to begin with. Gotham’s hospitals are packed to capacity every night treating ODs and trauma victims. I’m not trying to kill anybody.”

“Some of them are trying to kill you,” Bane tells him.

“They can go ahead and keep trying,” John says, meeting Bane’s eyes evenly, though they’re beginning to cloud over and his face is a brilliant scarlet. “I’m not sorry I didn’t fire my weapon tonight, and I don’t give a shit if you think I’m just a silly little half-measure in a monkey suit.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Well, what do you think,” he asks, holding himself perfectly still and maintaining the clasp of his hand around Bane’s wrist.

“I think your heart is full of honor and virtue that the world would grind under its heel if given half a chance.” Bane catches John’s chin in his hand so that his thumb presses along the seam of John’s red open mouth. “And rather than meet it with the selfsame disdain it gives to you, you leave yourself vulnerable to attack under a system that will not protect you in the event that it should fail.”

John’s eyelids get heavy, and the manacle of his fingers loosens, but Bane doesn’t move. Scraping his teeth over Bane’s knuckles and slipping his tongue beneath the pad of his thumb, he says, “You say that like you wish someone would.”

“Bring harm to you?”

“Protect me,” John sighs, pulling out of Bane’s one hand to move into the other one, the one stroking him.

“I take more comfort in knowing you are fully capable of protecting yourself.”

John’s breath stutters in his chest and he takes Bane in hand, giving him a searching look and swallowing thickly before saying, “Can I?”

“Yes—” he sighs, cutting himself off to groan when John does, seating himself on Bane’s cock in one fluid, heady slide.

Bane clutches at John’s shoulders, fists handfuls of his hair, bites the taut skin beneath his jaw, everything he can do, everything he can think of to be closer, to bring the fever down by burning it out, by setting themselves alight one bitten kiss at a time. John wraps both his arms around Bane’s neck, holding on tighter the more desperately he moves.

“This _thing_ — and how it’s… in you, too — it wouldn’t make us — m-make us…?”

John doesn’t get the rest of his question out before he’s shaking and coming apart, but Bane knows well enough what he thought to ask. He’s noticed for himself that tonight has given them such things they never sought to have before, and he has noticed, too, that he has enjoyed the tasting of these things.

“You wonder if it is always in us to bend in this way,” Bane says in between great gulps of air. He’s hard still, and inside John, still, waiting for him to want to go again. “You and I.”

“I’m less hung up on that,” John grits out, sucking a mark into Bane’s throat.

“What other thought could be preying on your mind?”

“Aside from my erection lasting for more than four hours?” he asks, glib but coherent, even for the sweat pouring off of him.

“This hunger in our flesh,” Bane prompts him, half a question.

“My sexual identity crisis happened way before I met you, man.”

Bane hums, of a mind to let it go if John would prefer him to let it go. It is how they’ve negotiated terms this far, with absolutes and limitations. So he merely says, “Then I will not ask you again.”

John looks up at him, and there, once more, the openness of expression, the drop in tension. He looks back down, into the middle distance, and then more fixedly at the place where their bodies meet. He rocks forward in Bane’s lap so their bare chests touch and stick, and the skin tingles upon separation.

“Lie flat for me?” John says, placing his hand over Bane’s heart but applying no pressure.

Bane obliges him. He really is lovely to look at, and lovelier to touch. To feel.

“Got any other poems you’re turning over in your head?” John teases with a smirk, timing his question to the rollicking of his hips.

Bane times his own response to the tide of his grasping hands: _“…he is action and power / The flush of the known universe is in him, / Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well…”_

John tosses his head, and the sound of his laugh twisting midway through into a moan pulls a similar music out of Bane. Together, they are a rhapsody.

—

Ivy turns into Harley’s kiss, smearing the _Ocimum sanctum_ between their mouths. The thrumming in her skin sets nearby seeds to blooming, unleashing a sweet-smelling perfume into the greenhouse. Harley’s luminous with many pied, earthy poultices that glow in proximity to Ivy’s breath and body heat. She’s regained her quick and easy smile, the real one. The palm she presses in a hot curve along Ivy’s throat squeezes, slips, lower, seeking.

“I ever tell you I love your green thumb, babe?” Harley croons, nipping at Ivy’s ear.

“Only my thumb?” Ivy asks, smiling.

Harley laughs, and that’s real, too.

—

Two fraught orgasms later, Bane still hasn’t come and the tension in his body starts to feel, at least to John, like it might be the kind that hurts. John leans over the edge of the bed to take up one of the remaining clean towels and presses it to Bane’s forehead and down his flushed cheeks. He peels it back, pausing to study Bane’s face when his eyes stay closed.

He’s a good-looking guy. If John saw him at a bar sans mask and fur coat, he wouldn’t think twice about approaching him. But he had to go and be intelligent and respectful and generous on top of that, didn’t he? Dick.

John tears his eyes away with the excuse of wiping them down the rest of the way with the towel. “Hey,” he murmurs, “do you need your mask on?”

There’s a long beat of silence, and then Bane sighs. “In a moment.”

“What do you need now?”

“Just this.”

John tosses the towel and lies down next to him again, gripping Bane in a loose fist he can chase with his hips. It gets John hot all over, that needy, languid motion. He wriggles down the bed to mouth at Bane’s hip. “Should be wearing off soon, shouldn’t it?”

“Another hour—” he groans, strangled, as John swallows him down. His hand is big and gentle in John’s hair, curved against the base of his skull.

It’s not long at all before he’s coming down John’s throat. He’s quiet, but he can’t hide how he shivers and gasps for air after. Not from John, as close as he is. He can’t hide a thing, and John wouldn’t want him to anyway.

The mask sits on the bedside table, unobtrusive. Bane has a look about him like he’s not going to reach for it anytime soon, but John can see the tendons standing out in his neck and along his forearms. He takes one last look at Bane’s face, his mouth, and pushes down the impulse to smear a kiss there. He could, Bane would let him, but it’ll just make going without it harder, and as much as he wants to pretend he doesn’t know why, he knows well enough.

“Here, incoming,” John whispers, fitting the gnarled thing over Bane’s mouth first and ensuring it sits correctly over his nose. He remembers every gear and catch and makes quick work of getting it properly situated. “Deep breaths, come on.”

Bane takes one, holds it, and releases it steadily. He takes three more just like it before he opens his eyes again.

“Better?”

“Yes,” he murmurs, the corners of his eyes creasing. “Thank you.”

John nods, glad for it, but kicking himself over that kiss he didn’t take. He lies down shoulder to shoulder with Bane, eyes on the ceiling.

He doesn’t feel hot anymore. Doesn’t feel that cloying sweetness sticking to the back of his throat every time he breathes. The space in his head feels cool and fluid like water from a stream. He starts to announce it, gets as far as opening his mouth, and hesitates.

Does he leave, now that he can? Does he stop all the lingering touches and burning looks, now that he can?

Was it ever actually about his inability to leave, or did his choice to come here rely solely on the fact that he knew all along he wouldn’t mind staying? And what, if anything, does he have to tell Bane about it?

John sighs heavily, rubbing his hands over his face. At least there’s one thing he’s decided on. He takes his hands away to say, “It’s past,” and hears but doesn’t watch Bane turn onto his side.

A warm hand drifts over his belly and roosts there. Idly, Bane rumbles, “If you are thinking of going, I would ask you to reconsider.”

“Yeah, would you?” John asks, turning onto his side, too, and looking Bane in his warm, smiling eyes. “Well, I’m listening.”

Bane huffs a laugh, and John’s surprised to realize he missed the sound of it— and even more stunned that he knew it well enough to miss it. “You have shown yourself to be partial to borrowed words. Will you hear a few more?”

John smirks, trying not to be disarmed at the offer. “Sure,” he says.

 _“This ecstasy doth unperplex, / We said,”_ he begins, in a strange, wistful voice, _“and tell us what we love; / We see by this it was not sex, / We see we saw not what did move; / But as all several souls contain / Mixture of things, they know not what, / Love these mix’d souls doth mix again / And makes both one, each this and that.”_

“Oh,” John mumbles, mashing his hand over his eyes again, wanting to laugh like he did before, but he can’t. He wants his broken fever to mean he can just get up and go, _and he can,_ he _can_ just get up and go, it’s not like Bane wouldn’t let him. He heaves a sigh. “Who’s that?”

“John Donne.”

He nods from underneath his hand and lets Bane take it away from his face a second later.

“Of course you are free to go if you wish, John,” Bane tells him, soft.

“I know I am,” John answers, soft in the same way. Slowly, tellingly, he adds, “Free to stay, too.” He darts a questing glance at Bane. “If I wanted to.”

Bane smiles with his eyes again. “Certainly.”

“Would _you_ want me to?”

“Yes,” he answers simply, nakedly. He soothes his hand over John’s ribs in a circle. “I think you are in need of reassurance. How may I give it to you?”

John tries and fails to bite back a smile, saying, “You just did.”

“Ah,” he huffs, sounding both agreeable and entertained at the same time. “How little I knew you, to think you were not sentimental.”

“I’m not,” John insists, again. “But I know what I like.”

“As do I.”

This time John doesn’t fight to keep the smile off his face. He says, “Good.”

“Good,” Bane echoes, and now that John’s not listening through a blurry, feverish sex delirium, he can hear how tired Bane sounds, how drained he must be, and hell, that’s only fair, John took him for every last drop he had.

Uh, literally.

“Want me to bring back a plate? Some water?”

“Please, and…” Bane twists to look behind himself at the mess of discarded towels they’ve left behind. “Another towel.”

“You got it.” John pushes up onto his elbows, sits up, and thinking better of hopping right out of bed, turns to look at Bane. He bends down to press his lips where the mask leaves his skin exposed, just beneath Bane’s eye. John can feel his eyelashes against his cheek when his eyes flutter closed. He can feel it in the bunching of Bane’s cheek when he smiles and can’t help matching it. “Stay put.”

“Yes. Hurry back.”

It’s a fucked up world they live in, John thinks, ambling out of Bane’s spartan twin bed wearing hickeys and nothing else to see about scrounging up some provisions.

It’s a fucked up world, but not in here. Not ever in here, not when everything beyond this apartment has to wait its goddamn turn to get at them.

John loads up a plate with fruit and a torn off piece of crusty bread, refills the canteen with water from the tap, and hunts around for a clean towel. In his search, he notices a book by the opened window written entirely in sleek, ornamental Arabic and tucks that under his arm, too, before making his way back carefully to the bedroom. English and French amass the scope of John’s language skills, but he thinks Bane will read it to him if he asks, and he’s in the mood to ask for everything he wants, just about.

John settles the plate on the bed between them and tosses the towel so Bane can catch it. He doesn’t make a big deal out of the book, just sets it down beside Bane’s hip so it’ll be in his line of sight when he sits up, and sure enough, once he finishes with the towel, Bane takes up the book. He thumbs open to a page seemingly at random and smoothes his finger over the page number.

“Read it to me?” John asks, popping an orange wedge into his mouth.

Bane looks up at him for a long moment, eyes clear but indecipherable, before tucking his chin to read.

\- EPILOGUE -

A halogen light overhead strains. Filament hisses. Refrigerated air chugs through the vents over the door in bursts. A layer of sweat clings to his skin beneath the starched cotton-polyester blend of his uniform.

It’s been ninety-seven days since his last glimpse of sunlight. Not the longest he’s gone without. Not by a long shot.

The metal door to his cell clangs twice. Not alone, now. Not ever alone, here. Only alone the way all people are always alone. The way he’s known himself best all along.

_“Inmate E-146, approach the door. Slowly.”_

He doesn’t bother to look up or stand. He doesn’t approach the door.

The voice issues a warning, but he stays where he is, back to the opposite wall, arms encircling his splayed knees, head tipped back against the brick. He knows from observation that the floor is rigged to administer electric shock, and he knows from keeping an ear to the ground that they will warn him two more times before giving him the juice.

The second warning comes. He doesn’t move except to straighten up off the wall and fix a flaying stare into the pinhole lens of the camera pointed at him from the corner of the room. The third warning sounds, and that red laser eye of Argus winks out.

Fifty thousand volts rock his little cell. His body arcs. His muscles seize. The light above explodes.

When the humming subsides, he falls slack, curled towards the wall, face obscured by shadow. His door swings open. One footstep, then a second. There’s a hand on his shoulder, turning him, and he flings his arm out in a single harsh, upright motion, driving a screwdriver into the underside of an orderly’s jaw.

The wound seeps black in the atrophied darkness of his padded cell. Black spatters his face and mouth. He rolls the body off of him and wipes the back of his wrist across his mouth, kicking the rubber inserts off his jumpsuit. Finally, at long last, some color.

Speaking of which, a square of it catches his eye in the doorway. Must’ve jumped out of the orderly’s hand when he walked into the cell.

Nobody in this place ever lets him have anything fun.

No use explaining to them how counterintuitive that really is. Maybe he can’t get his hands on his preferred palette of greasepaints, but blood’s easy enough to come by, and ink, if you know the right guy who can get it. He combs his bloodied fingers through his hair, smearing the stuff down his uneven side part, and bends to scoop up the brightly colored parcel.

There’s a cartoon mallet drawn on the face of it in fluorescent paint. He steps out into the hallway to get a better look at the pink dust like dyed sugar limning the crisp white shell of it. It’s wrapped in a bright pink ribbon to match. He pulls the ribbon, and—

All he knows for sure, judging by the few pieces stuck to his hand, is that confetti and glitter explodes out of the parcel, covering him in shiny plastic shrapnel. A piece of it is lodged in his ear, and the one half up his nose he manages to knock loose with one vigorous sneeze. He sneezes a few more times, tasting sweet, and then his ass hits concrete.

There’s an alarm blaring, lights flashing. He should’ve cleared the wing by now. Should’ve traded out his asylum gear for the orderly’s scrubs. Should’ve maybe not opened this little gag gift of Harley’s in the first place, except he’d been curious. That’s always been his problem when it comes right down to it.

His curiosity for the Bat will live on in perpetuity, but Harley had her own role to play in his jester’s court, once. He doesn’t deny it. He knows better than most what little merit there is to be had in rejecting a certainty of reality.

The guards find him laid out in the gaping mouth of his cell, blood drying under his nails and in his hair, tiny, glistening cutouts stuck to his cheek and forehead, under his collar, up his sleeve. Like many, many calling cards he hasn’t kept since isolation. A cloud of pink stains his cheek and nose like a dressing room mishap or a batch of cocaine infused with cotton candy.

They throw him into solitary, and three more guards drop from the thing that took him out before they think to handle him with gloves.

Polite civilization has always been marked by its inability to hold onto chaos without getting a little bit of it everywhere. More’s the pity, really. What a riot these folks would have if they only knew what fun they were missing.

In the still, muggy darkness of the hole they leave him in, he thinks about the department store he gifted to Harley for a solid fifteen minutes before they struck the match that set it all to burning. He thinks of the tassels and rhinestones and sequins on her outfit and how all those many kaleidoscopes of color erupted in the bleak haze of daylight.

He thinks of the lit-up wick of her hair when direct sunlight passed through it. Her manic grin and her gleaming eyes.

He thinks of the Bat’s empty-black suit, dark like a fire pit gone cold, only smoke and ash left behind. He thinks of the clean artillery-snap of a gun rack sliding home, and the unlit fuse on a stick of dynamite, and resolution. Thinks about the pinholes of light in the Bat’s eyes, like a dead star calling out from across an eternity of frozen, imperturbable void. An incorruptible shade painting the night darker. The obstacle. The rock. The immovable object.

—he laughs.

—

The monitor in the cave pings, and Bruce finishes soldering the bracers he’s fortifying before looking up. He scans the screen a few times, reading and re-reading the incident report. The staff at Arkham alerted the authorities to report the murdered orderly in E-Ward and are currently engaged in a concerted effort to identify the mystery contagion released in Joker’s cell.

Bruce pulls up the security feed for Unit E-146. The footage cuts out before the altercation took place, but he plays it back at half speed anyway, scrubbing through it one frame at a time until the eyes in the cell drag the long way up and bore into his own.

He sits back in his chair and presses his knuckles into the hard line of his frown. After a moment, not wanting to be the one to look away first, he hits the play button. For a long held breath, they’re locked there, watching, and then the monitor plunges into black. He lets go of that breath he’d been holding and toggles over to the crime scene photos taken by the first officers on the scene. There’s blood and a spray of color. He isolates a portion of the picture and zooms in.

“Interesting choice,” he mumbles, squinting at what can only be confetti.

He drags the picture around, searching for context in an image that doesn’t seem to have any, until he sees the little package and the partial view of a pictograph adorning the side of it. Eventually he finds the right angle to make out the shape of a cartoon mallet and tabs over to the toxicology report on the unknown substance in Joker’s system and those of the guards who mishandled him.

Not the best execution by any means, but he can sort of see what Quinn was going for, and it wasn’t to help. He prints out the tox screen and methodically closes out the remaining windows until only one remains. The black screen of Joker’s cell.

The live feed when he switches back to it shows the evidence tags and the blood stains, the abandoned screwdriver Bruce knows was the murder weapon. He closes out that window, too, takes a breath, and dives into the preliminary findings from the labs at Arkham, cross-referencing their results with the archives at Indian Hill. Something will come up. Even nothing could carry the potential to be illuminating.

—

“Bane,” Ivy says without looking up from her tome of equations and conversion charts. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“Yes. Hello, Dr. Isley.”

“No lasting side effects from the other night?” she asks, finally looking up at him from over the top of her glasses. “For you or for your partner?”

“None, but you have touched on the nature of my visit.”

She pushes her glasses up the bridge her nose and studies the unmoving, mountainous man stationed to the left of the door so that he won’t appear to be blocking her only exit. Very polite of him to consider the picture he presents, walking into her greenhouse where all around them her flowering children wait and listen and yearn for her command.

“You have my attention.”

“The compound,” he says, bluntly, fisting his huge hands at the collar of his jacket. “Do you have more of it?”

“Yes. Why?”

In a ruminative voice like warmed cider, he says, “I would like to buy some of it from you. If you are willing to sell it to me, of course.”

Ivy is not often surprised at the machinations of people. Disappointed and disgusted, often, but disarmed? Never. She runs her fingers over the last line she just wrote in her notes, smearing some of the ink that hasn’t dried yet. The numbers in the conversion chart catch her eye, and she stares for a moment at the cramped notation. She looks up at him to find that he hasn’t moved a muscle.

“The going rate is information,” she tells him. “I’d like to know how the compound affected you. Still interested?”

“As money belongs to a system I detest,” he starts, looking down, “I accept your terms.”

“Don’t mind him. He’s used to a more fibrous diet.”

Bane hums and bends at the waist to nudge Ransom between the ears with two fingers, astonishingly gentle, for a man of his size and power. “He has mutations,” he remarks casually, confidently.

That surprises her, too. She says, “You’re the first to notice.”

“I am quite familiar with experimental surgeries affecting the spinal cord.” And then, unbelievably, to Ransom, he croons, “We are survivors, you and I.”

Ransom, as far as she can tell— he is a rabbit, after all, albeit a genetically modified one— seems pleased at the compliment. His floppy ears twitch, and he leans back onto his hind legs to look myopically up the long line of Bane’s body at his face.

“Please, sit.”

“Thank you.”

Ivy takes down a smaller notepad and pulls a stool out to sit across from him. He answers her questions with an air of good humor, and halfway through, when Ransom won’t be deterred from investigating his boots any longer, Bane draws him up into his lap where he settles straight away. He spends the remainder of their meeting brushing his fingers down the length of Ransom’s back.

—

John has no ear for Arabic, but he’s picking up the alphabet fairly quickly. There are exactly four kids at St. Swithin’s who speak it, and their penmanship makes his look like the first attempts of a three-year-old just learning to hold a pencil and not the painstakingly earnest, wholly ugly, triumph of a man in his thirties.

Oh, well. It’s kind of worth it for the hushed laughter it gets him from Bane when he shows up at his safe house after work that night with sheaves and sheaves of loping, clumsy letters that look more like squiggles than they do like the building blocks of any language, let alone one as neat and flowing as Arabic.

“Perhaps I can be of some assistance,” Bane muses, something soft in his voice. Fondness. “Get me a pen. There should be one in the pack just there.”

John grabs the indicated bag and riffles around in it, distracted by the aluminum tinkling of cans. He shifts it higher up on his shoulder, switches pockets, and stops, heart skipping a beat in his chest at the familiar pink canisters, at least a dozen of them if not more.

“Dr. Isley was kind enough to give me the remainder of her current supply,” Bane explains loftily. “You won’t find yourself dosed accidentally again.”

“Accidentally,” John repeats, looking up at him.

“With my input, she has refined the formula to suit my constitution. It should not be communicable in the same manner as the original. Ideally, you wouldn’t be affected at all, not in the way we observed.”

John rubs his thumb against the smooth pink layer of paint. A bolt of heat churns in his gut. “Oh,” he says, rolling the sound around in his mouth. Through the spike of want, he can’t tell if he’s disappointed at the prospect or not. It hadn’t been all that bad, before. Sort of embarrassing at times, but even then, only because they kept getting interrupted.

Bane takes a few methodical steps toward him, slow, measured. He covers the back of John’s hand with his, saying, “She did advise me of one particular canister she left unaltered,” and produces one can painted a darker pink than the rest.

Looking at it makes John’s skin feel tight and— sweet. He hooks his finger in the pin but doesn’t pull, just looking at Bane steadily, as clear-eyed as he can. His heartbeat kicks up into a gallop, making the edge of his smile that much sharper. “You want to?”

Laughing, Bane says, “I suppose your Arabic lesson will keep.”

John grins and pulls the pin.

—

Harley reads about her dear ol’ puddin’s escape attempt from the roof of Ivy’s greenhouse over a cup of green tea. There’s nothing in print about the glitter bomb or the cute tiny penis confetti, but there’s plenty in there about the mysterious chemical agent that took him and three guards outta commission. The orderly who got stabbed up and drowned to death choking on his own blood got two whole lines of print near the end.

Hell of an exit strategy he had. She’s pleased as punch that she found a way to mess it up for him without even knowing she was doing it. He’ll bust out eventually and make her life hell all over again, but she’ll take this win, no matter how silly it might look from the outside.

She balls up the newspaper and tosses it without looking to see where it lands. She doesn’t need him or what he stands for anymore. She knows herself enough, now, to know that she never did.

—

The gorgeous, somber lab nerd with the flame-red hair delicately takes the newspaper away before Ransom can finish shredding it with his teeth. She tucks him neatly her arm, greenhouse warm and smelling of cypress and jasmine. Sweet as sunlight in the summertime, she says, “Hungry?”

 _Starving, sweetheart,_ he thinks, jonesing for red meat real fuckin’ bad, thanks for asking. Day 28 of fuckin’ crunchy straw, for God’s sake. It’s enough to drive anyone mad. He’d mow down men for a nice bloody steak right now. Except then she lowers him into the spacious pen she and Dynamite Blonde put together for him, and once the hay’s in front of him, his stomach takes over and it’s goodbye, rabbit food, down the gullet it goes. Such bullshit.

Sometimes he thinks they ought to’ve just left him in that plastic box where they found him in that other place. But they did sorta shoot him up with fiery death stuff twice a day every day and fuse crap into his spine, and that wasn’t so great either.

Lotsa times he thinks he remembers being something other than a rabbit they plucked out of a bin inevitably destined for the incinerator, but he can’t figure who that would’ve been, if he ever was anyone else. So he’s a fuckin’ a rabbit or whatever, and of all the things he could’ve been, at least he’s something that can think and feel smug and crave a good medium rare porterhouse every once in a while.

And at least the dames lookin’ after him nowadays know just how to scratch his ears. That’s pretty decent.

Even Big Boy, when he’s around, ain’t so bad. Fuckin’ guy could do with skippin’ a back day now and again, Jesus Christ, but hell, life is already so goddamn strange. Asshole might as well be huge and soft if Ransom’s gotta be soft _and_ _tiny_.

Honestly, some guys get all the breaks.

\- END -

**Author's Note:**

> Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric  
> Pablo Neruda, Alianza/Alliance (Sonata)  
> John Donne, The Ecstasy 


End file.
